


Oresteia

by holyfant



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Aischylos, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 05:54:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is nothing more bitter than being left alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oresteia

**Author's Note:**

> Traditionally in three parts, but as all good tragedies, always straining to break through the frontiers. This is quite old, and I just found it while cleaning out my hard drive.

 

 

  1. Iphigenia




 

For the longest time she insisted to her mother and sisters that she hated the war. Every war but especially this war. Her mother tried to soothe her first, brushing her hair at night while Iphigenia watched her distorted yellow reflection in the bronze. Later Klytaimnestra was angry, pulling at the braids cruelly, snapping at her insolent daughter she should be proud to have a father so valiant and strong, and an uncle so fierce who loved her father so.

 

But she knew Menelaos did not love her father. He had always hated his brother, and he had always hated his wife, and he had always hated the Trojans, and he had always hated peace. What she hated, she told herself silently at night, massaging her scalp to soothe the pain her mother had inflicted on her, was men who mistook hate for love. Even worse, those who mistook cruelty for honour. Her father was the more valiant of the two, but also the more capable. She hoped he would not forget his family, so far away, in such a different land.

 

When word arrived that she was to help the Achaians by marrying Achilleus, she felt conflicted. From what she knew of the skilled warrior, he could well be exactly like her uncle; a dumb brute who did not know for what to live and therefore followed an uninspected path carved by tradition.

 

Yet she went. Because she trusted her father. Her head hurt.

 

  1. Agamemnoon




 

When she was a child he had often put his hands on her neck when she was restless. The pressure of his heavy fingers on her pulse made her relax and sleep. She was a thinking child; he often found it slightly improper for a girl, but somehow in spite of himself he liked her seriousness, the way she could come to him late at night and ask him questions that he himself had never before considered. He understood little of her but he knew she was a treasure.

 

He was a father and a fighter at at last he could no longer prevent the two from meeting. So here he was, with his hands on his daughter's blushing neck again, again, for the last time an act that she had always read as kindness. He had to harden now, conflate his routinely bloodstained killing hands with his secretly tender parenting ones, and push at her pulse point, which was so weak, so easy to break. He had to make her loving words falter to a panicked pleading spitting, watch her radiant eyes turn dark with a deep knowledge of him, of his utter betrayal that could not be washed away by his tears that fell onto her open-mouthed face. The o of her lips that described her shock and, worse, her _I knew it._ She tore her bridal chiton clawing at his hands, went tense and then with an almost watery sigh went limp, as she had so often before, drifting off to sleep under the same-different hands.

 

As she burned and the winds picked up, cruelly, softly, like laughter, his confused hands plucked at his body like birds, like they didn't know whose they were anymore.

 

  1. Klytaimnestra




 

The house held its breath. The flames in the hearth were stifled and choked into obedient embers that flared up now and then. The gauzes in the doorways didn't flutter, never, not once, almost marble-like with Elektra's equally frozen outline on the other side, curved like a question mark. It was noon but the house was dark. Klytaimnestra felt fear and hatred fighting for a place in her throat, and she was both moved and enraged by the way her stupid, silent daughter managed to make her question a plan years in the making, a plan approved by all laws of men if not by the gods themselves. Just by standing there in the doorway, not uttering a word into the growing stillness of the air around them.

 

She was still a mother despite the hole left by Iphigenia, which could only be filled by revenge, white-hot and murderous, and she sensed the question mark growing stronger. The growing confusion of her normally so windswept daughter, who liked chitons that bounced as she ran and secretly unbraided her hair to feel it against her cheeks. Who even as a child slept the most soundly in a storm. When Elektra eventually slipped past the lank curtain into the clamminess, the growing darkness around Klytaimnestra, her hair was lank on her head and there was water on her cheeks, although she could not know. Orestes hung to her sweaty hand like a puppet.

 

When their mother opened her mouth to speak she found she had no air left in her lungs to say anything at all, and she could only wait for the heavy footsteps of her husband returning, which would bring the winds.

 

  1. Orestes




 

Sometime he felt like two people. At day, wandering the island that changed every day under his feet and the winds, he felt almost shocked, like the small child he was when he was brought here, bloodstained in a way that would never wash off. Barefoot, with hardened heels and heart, he sought tall rocks and stood on them, stretching his body, young, lean, to the heavens and tried to not feel pliable anymore. To create a body of bronze with a heart of quicksand. At day, sun-baked, he burned for revenge.

 

At night he felt soft, exposed, blurred at the edges. He sought his sisters' hands to hold in his dreams but found nothing, only a strange stillness, a clammy space. He cried for his mother in his sleep.

 

It was impossible for him to want to kill his mother by day yet want her to hold him at night. To dispel his growing sense of doubleness he tried to stop sleeping. When sleep did claim him, as sleep like a sneaking thief unchangeably does, his dreams were of his family's bodies smothering him in excessive love; his mother pressing him to her breast like an infant, his sisters tearing out their hair and letting it fall on him like grim feathers. They screamed at their mother. Hot tears falling onto his closed eyelids.

 

That's when he knew that in his dreams, he was his father's corpse.

 

And that's when he knew he was ready.

 

  1. Elektra




 

There is nothing more bitter than being left alone. Under the trees, which she has always loved, she hates everything, especially how an honourable life is elusive. And how nothing is believed that is true, and how everything of beauty is cut down. The bark cuts into her back. The sky overhead wheels on, indifferent.

 


End file.
